Cloud computing - episodes ...

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

MS BPOS cloud service hit with data breach
- http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...th_data_breach
December 22, 2010 - "Company data belonging to customers of Microsoft's hosted business suite BPOS has been accessed and downloaded by other users of the software. The issue affected the Offline Address Book of customers of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) Standard suite... "We recently became aware that, due to a configuration issue, Offline Address Book information for Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) Standard customers could be inadvertently downloaded by other customers of the service, in a very specific circumstance," said Clint Patterson, director of BPOS Communications at Microsoft. The data breach occurred in Microsoft data centers in North America, Europe and Asia. The issue was resolved within two hours of being discovered, Microsoft said in a statement. However, during this time "a very small number" of illegitimate downloads occurred. "We are working with those few customers to remove the files," Patterson said. This Offline Address Book contains an organization's business contact information for employees. It is stored on a server hosted by Microsoft as part of Exchange Online but can be downloaded for offline access. It does not contain Outlook personal contacts, e-mail, documents or other types of information, Microsoft stressed... BPOS includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting. In October, Microsoft outlined the next version of BPOS, called Office 365, intended to be a full-fledged option to Google Apps and other cloud-based suites. Office 365 combines the collaboration and communication elements of BPOS with Office Web Apps and, alternatively, even with Office 2010."

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Top 10 Cloud stories Of 2010
- http://www.informationweek.com/news/...-last-featured
12/24/2010 - "Everybody's head was in the cloud, or so it seemed in 2010. Both well established and startup vendors developed solutions and strategies designed to extend their reach or provide entry into this booming market. After all, IDC estimated the cloud market will be worth $55 billion by 2014; Gartner predicted the cloud world could be valued at $148 billion at that time*..."

* http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1389313

Windows 8 will be cloud-based ...
- http://windows8beta.com/2010/03/wind...cloud-based-os
___

Criminals host trojans on Cloud Storage Service Rapidshare
- http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Cr...dshare-339725/
2010-12-30 - "Spammers are using cloud-based storage services to store malware, allowing them to circumvent e-mail spam filters, according to security experts at Kaspersky Lab and MX Lab. Kaspersky Lab detected the click-fraud Trojan, a variant of the Trojan-Dropper.Wind32.Drooptroop family, which has been in circulation since the beginning of December, said Vicente Diaz, a Kaspersky Lab expert. There are over 7,000 variants of this particular family, according to Kaspersky. As with other types of malware that took advantage of the holiday season, the executable file for this Trojan was named gift.exe, Diaz said. The security firm detected more than 1,000 infections using this technique to distribute this variant, according to Diaz. The Trojan is stored on Rapidshare, a cloud-based file-sharing and storage service. The spam messages that users receive in their Inbox have no text, just a single link pointing to a valid Rapidshare URL. These messages get past spam filters because there are no malicious files attached, the domain name is not considered a “bad” one, and executables hosted on Rapidshare aren’t automatically classified as a threat, said Diaz. There was also a recent fake antivirus spam campaign that included a Rapidshare link pointing to surprise.exe, according to security firm MX Lab. The executable file downloads and installs the fake AV Security Shield on the user’s computer, which runs after the computer is rebooted. Once downloaded, there’s no guarantee that authentic antivirus products will detect these Trojans. According to MX Lab, only 16 of the 43 major antivirus products detected surprise.exe as a Trojan or as fake AV..."

- http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/11...e_in_the_cloud

- http://blog.mxlab.eu/2010/12/14/malw...-surprise-exe/

The year of the cloud ...
- http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-com...-the-cloud-888
December 30, 2010

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Has Big Brother gone Global?
- http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=10261
Last Updated: 2011-01-12 13:45:46 UTC - "... the Tunsinian Government may be harvesting or hacking information from Gmail accounts and or Facebook accounts. This goes to show the moment it is in the “cloud” it is no longer private. If you want something private, encrypt it. Most of us at the ISC follow the “front page” rule. If you write it, treat it like the information is on the front page of your national newspaper.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1715575/t...mail-anonymous
Going back to last year, the US National Security Agency considers their network untrustworthy.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10333 ..."

- http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-01-07/

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Trojan built to disable cloud AV...
- http://www.itnews.com.au/News/245426...antivirus.aspx
Jan 20, 2011 - "Microsoft has discovered a Trojan that aims to sever the connection between a device and the cloud antivirus (AV) service that is meant to protect it. The Bohu Trojan, which targets Windows machines, contains three main functions: evade detection, install a filter that blocks traffic between the device and service provider, and prevent the local installation from uploading data to the server. The attack appears to aim to knock out the additional layer of security that many antivirus companies have added to bolster defences and reduce the processing burden of ever-expanding signature databases. "Cloud-based virus detection generally works by client sending important threat data to the server for backend analysis, and subsequently acquiring further detection and removal instruction," Jingli Li and Zhitao Zhou of Microsoft Malware Protection Center wrote on the company's blog..."
* http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/arch...the-cloud.aspx

- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01...usting_trojan/
20 January 2011

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Google wipes out Gmail settings and msgs...
- http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ounts-messages
Feb 28 2011 - "COMPLAINTS ARE FLOODING IN to Google after some Gmail users woke up to find that their inboxes had been wiped clean of messages. A number of Gmail forum posters report that their messages, labels and settings have all been set back to default. The consensus is that it is a problem on Google's end, with many people deeply concerned because many of them use Gmail as their main email account... Google confirmed that there is a problem on the Google Apps dashboard. Engineers are busy working on the issue, with the affected accounts disabled... Already a major glitch for Google's cloud technology, this will be a horrendous public relations disaster if there is no backup system in place. The company is trying to sort this out quickly."

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Google: "software update" triggered loss...
- http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...red-gmail-loss
Mar 01 2011 - "... Google has confirmed that a storage software update was responsible for causing some Gmail users to lose access to their e-mail. Some Gmail users complained of losing e-mails, contacts, and folders. Google claimed that 0.29 per cent of the user base was affected by the problem but has since revised that figure to less than 0.02 per cent, or about 40,000 of the service's 200 million accounts. Ben Treynor, Google VP of engineering and site reliability czar, said sorry for the mess and said he expects to have the lost data restored soon. He said that the data was not completely lost and Google had restored most of it already... Users might be wondering how safe all this cloud computing lark really is if, as Google promises, all the data was backed up in different locations with the keys owned by people who have never met each other. Treynor said this is because in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data..."

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Some Customer Data Permanently Destroyed in Amazon Cloud Crash
- https://www.sans.org/newsletters/new...ssue=34#sID200
April 29, 2011 - "... You can put your data in the cloud - it's getting it back that's the hard part..."

... Lessons to other cloud-based businesses.
- http://www.informationweek.com/news/...ndly=this-page
April 28, 2011 - "... A note posted to the Amazon Services Health Dashboard April 24 said the three-day service outage will be fully explained in "a detailed post mortem." On April 27, AWS CTO Werner Vogels posted to his blog a 2010 letter that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote to shareholders, extolling AWS' technology innovation and commitment to customers..."
___

Amazon Web Services » Service Health Dashboard
Current Status: http://status.aws.amazon.com/
(Scroll down for 'Status History')
___

- https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...guration_error
April 29, 2011 - "... Amazon posted updates, short and bulletin-like, throughout the outage, but what it offered in its postmortem* is entirely different. This nearly 5,700-word document includes a detailed look at what happened, an apology, a credit to affected customers, as well a commitment to improve its customer communications. Amazon didn't say explicitly whether it was human error that touched off the event, but hints at that possibility when it wrote that "we will audit our change process and increase the automation to prevent this mistake from happening in the future." The initial mistake, followed by the subsequent increase in network load, exposed a cascading series of issues, including a "re-mirroring storm" with systems continuously searching for a storage space..."
* http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

VMware - Cloud Foundry service outages
- http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05...ing-From-First
May 02,2011 - "VMware's new Cloud Foundry service was online for just two weeks when it suffered its first outage, caused by a power failure. Things got really interesting the next day, when a VMware employee accidentally caused a second, more serious outage while a VMware team was writing up a plan of action to recover from future power loss incidents. An inadvertent press of a key on a keyboard led to 'a full outage of the network infrastructure [that] took out all load balancers, routers, and firewalls... and resulted in a complete external loss of connectivity to Cloud Foundry.' Clearly, human error is still a major factor in cloud networks."
- http://support.cloudfoundry.com/entr...-2011-downtime

- http://www.informationweek.com/news/...ndly=this-page
May 02, 2011 - "... 69% of cloud providers think that cloud users are most responsible for security, and only 16% think it's a shared responsibility. But according to a Ponemon study conducted last year, 33% of users see cloud security as a shared responsibility, and 32% think that the provider alone is most responsible. Only 35% of cloud users, meanwhile, think that users should be most responsible for cloud security... Legally speaking, however, cloud providers really aren't responsible for data security, as long as they make some effort, according to their end user license agreements (EULAs)..."

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Cloud over cloud computing...
- http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/201...oud-computing/
May 9, 2011 - "It isn’t just Sony that has suffered from the hacker breach of their network, the whole cloud computing movement has taken a bit of a knock, or perhaps has had a wake-up call.
We reported the findings of a survey by the Ponemom Institute which, surprisingly, found that cloud service providers do not see security as their main concern. Perhaps Sony’s experience will make them think again. International news agency Reuters reckons it might*... One of the issues with cloud is liability. If there is a breach and data is lost, whose liability is it? At the moment the industry is trying to establish guidelines and working practices; but until that issue is resolved — if it ever is — expect pubic cloud adoption to be slow and cautious."
* http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7455C020110506
"Shares of companies that specialize in cloud computing have been some of top-performing stocks over the past year. But the attack on Sony, as well as a massive outage at Amazon.com Inc’s cloud computing center, have caused some businesses to put the brakes on plans to move their operations into the cloud. “Nobody is secure. Sony is just the tip of this thing,” said Eric Johnson, a professor at Dartmouth University who advises large corporations on computer technology strategies. Since news of the Sony breach broke on April 26, shares of companies involved in cloud computing have underperformed the broader market. Salesforce.com Inc, a maker of web-delivered software, has dropped 3 percent. VMware Inc, which sells software for building clouds, has declined 2 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has climbed 3.3 percent... the first round of contracts for early adopters are coming to an end after three-year deals and companies are seeking better performance and terms for disasters."

[AplusWebMaster]

FYI...

Microsoft BPOS cloud outage...
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05..._bpos_apology/
13 May 2011 - "... Customers on BPOS in the US and worldwide were kicked off their hosted Exchange email systems, being unable to read, write, or access their messages. All users were affected – from down in the cubicle farm all the way up to the CEO's corner office. The outages started Tuesday and came after weeks of the service slowly degrading. The cause of the problem, Thomson said*, was "malformed email traffic" in BPOS's Exchange Servers... "obscure cases" and "related issues"..."
* http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/...il-issues.aspx